


Spiritual Fruit

by StripySock



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Religion, Roma | Rome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-10-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 19:14:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1022388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StripySock/pseuds/StripySock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After M.Myriel fled to Rome and after his wife's death, he drifts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spiritual Fruit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [missm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/missm/gifts).



> With thanks to Carmarthen for her beta.

In Rome there was once a set of small white rooms, rather high off the ground, a second floor dwelling at least. The room that served as a reception room had, as its only advantage apart from the wide windows that looked over a narrow street, a very high set window in the corner with a swallow's nest outside. During the summer this was a cause of both mirth and annoyance, for the chittering of the birds, so pleasant in the morning, could interrupt a visit in the afternoon (of which there were few these days and thus each more precious than the last). The visitors would observe these small white rooms, with the few pieces of good furniture, and make eyes at each other that such a man, living in such a place, would set his table with heavy silver pieces. Those who knew him best knew that M. Myriel had once been a vain man and thought to themselves, with the smugness that a little knowledge brings, that he could not relinquish the pride he had once had. It is well known, though, that the people who pride themselves on seeing the most often overreach.

 

It was true that M. Myriel had once been a vain man, true also that he had been a gallant, true again that there had been more than one young girl in Paris who had cried into her pillow because he had declined to stand up with her for a dance or three. However, it can be noted, that these _were_  true. M. Myriel was above everything a sensible man. When he was but a year away from forty, he had observed his face gravely in the mirror and noted the flaws (the early light that high little window shed was excellent for that), and had set aside the remains of the coquetry that were left to him, resigned them to the grave with his wife. His vanity also, he had discarded, reckoning as was sensible that there was very little in the world quite as embarrassing as appearance without substance. The silver he kept, not from pride but for a remembrance of family. After all to lose the proud naming of your antecedents was to lose the last of your homeland and to be forever a wanderer, rootless and alone, withering in far distant lands.

 

Day by day for several minutes, sometimes a little longer, he went to the small church close by where he lived. Rome was full of churches, the Vatican was an abundance, an overflowing, but this one served his purpose: cool and silent inside, the face of the crucified Lord the only relief, a place where he could think. On the first day, he grieved, and for many days after, his wife's death a canker, a heartache. On the forty-first day he knelt at the back and calculated his small income, the little that was left to him, and reconsidered his expenditure. Thus the church served him first as grave, then as chancery, occasionally as salon, but never as intended - as a church. He was not yet a man to feel that loss; he had not shed that hard gaiety that even without vanity can clothe a bird-of-the-world. Having set aside his silks, the way he had once held his little finger just so from his hand, and the need for a coffee to digest his meals, he had not yet searched for what must replace them.

 

Kindness was a way of life to this man. The children of the street grew to love him, to outrageously cheat him, to extort from him the right to hold his hand to the fountain, when he went to collect water. Their mothers chattered to each other, not unlike the swallows that lived outside his window, a thin sweet piping Italian, their eyes following him with a kind curiosity that he was mostly unaware of. His visitors were generally other immigrants, some who knew who he had been, others who were too wrapped up in their own woes to remember, and each of them told their story as though they were the sole survivor of the wreckage of their world. He listened, solemnly as was his practice, as it had been when his father had demonstrated to him with due rigour the proper and correct procedure that a son of a councillor of the Parliament of Aix should follow. At first he gained the name of a good listener, but he quickly lost it when it became apparent that minor quarrels were not his concern.

 

The solitary wander to the church, the occasional visitor in the afternoon, the walk to the fountain, the midday sleep,  filled only the days, though. He took to wandering the streets at night, aware dimly that something was missing, had been missing for a long time, but unsure of what. With the careless languor of one born to position unwilling to look too deeply at what was around him, he became a familiar figure even to the villains and vagabonds who knew now that if they stopped him and demanded his money that he would turn out his pockets with a helpless shrug to reveal only a handkerchief.. If he went out in the twilight, occasionally a particular grave old man would fall into step with him, and with the freedom of the old to reprimand anyone younger, he would gently twit M. Myriel on his aimlessness, in the impeccable French that he had learned during his youth.

 

This old man was the priest of the church that M. Myriel frequented (though M. Myriel barely knew that) and though well-traveled and learned, he had, perhaps through some misfortune of birth or some neglect of breeding, never obtained any position higher. He had taken this with good grace and spent his life half with his parishioners, half tending the songbirds that were his passion. With the keen eye of a man who saw more than he let on, he observed the widower who neglected mass and yet ruminated at the back of the church at odd hours, and as best as he could, attempted to steer him to a purpose. M. Myriel, oblivious to such delicate touches, merely considered the old man an excellent soul, and walked on.

 

After M. Myriel had been there ten months (ten months since the death of his wife; two years and one month since he had fled France), he was woken one night by a wild knock at his door. The woman who kept the house greeted him with a plea that he fetch the priest, for there was a boy on the doorstep who she was sure was dying. M. Myriel dressed rapidly, searched for the priest and brought him post-haste, and attempted to arouse a physician who lived close by with assurances of pay. The physician, perhaps deeming these reassurances inadequate, or perhaps too fond of his bed, declined to leave it. M. Myriel resolved with what little knowledge he possessed to attend what was perhaps an inevitable death.

 

The woman of the house was a good woman and she had attempted to ease the boy as best she could, street urchin though he was, and had now retired to the corner to tell her beads, and then to knit, as the priest performed those final rites to ease the passage of the soul into the next world. M. Myriel could only watch, chafe the small cold hands, and at intervals give him a little water. He had the palpable sense in that moment, that between the three of them, the woman in her corner with her beads, the priest who murmured prayers over the boy's brow and he himself with all his will, they were holding back the dark formlessness of death. Though boys, even meagre orphans, are often strong, M. Myriel never quite lost that belief that it was that which made the difference. When the dawn came, the boy was still alive.

 

Before he left, the old man took M. Myriel aside, and with the odd gestures that sometimes come to the elderly, he affixed himself to one of Myriel's buttons and told him earnestly that kindness was excellent, and required in one who would do the work of God, but that a clear sight was more necessary. He asked if M.Myriel had observed the boy before that night, the clear signs of the rickets that prevented him from walking with ease, and then with similar rapidity informed him that prayer could work miracles but not alone. There must be men who would harness it and yet also see what must be done. M. Myriel, who thought he had glimpsed something of God in the face of the old man that night, did not protest that he had no intention of taking up similar good works for a living, but instead held his tongue.

 

It was another thirteen days before he came to any decision. In that time he had stopped in absentmindness by a market stall and purchased a very delicate, very blue watercolour painting and hung it in the little white room. He glanced at it often and when he had made up his mind to set his hand to the plough that could not be turned away from, to discard the good sense that urged him against such a path, that had never steered him wrong before, it was with ease. He bade a smiling goodbye to good sense, to the comfortable ennui of obliviousness, and took up a pen. He looked at the painting once more, and perceived how feminine it was, how neatly it altered the room, and with a smile, he began his letter.

 

_My dearest sister,_


End file.
